IN THIS ISSUE:

LENA Pro has the ability to revolutionize the way that we chart the developmental language progress of children with hearing loss. The system provides language environment analysis data that would be almost impossible to acquire without significant financial resources for recording, transcription, and coding analysis. With this unique speech recognition tool, speech language professionals and families of children with hearing loss have the opportunity to access feedback on spoken language use and language environment almost immediately.

This is a welcome improvement over the recent past, when teachers, interventional specialists, and habilitation and rehabilitation providers were never quite sure whether the strategies they were teaching or recommending were actually being generalized into everyday life. Moreover, the reports and data generated from the LENA recordings provide speech language professionals and parents with access to the concise information that they need to custom tailor their treatment efforts.

Furthermore, the research tools in LENA Pro allow us to estimate how much language the child with a hearing loss is exposed to within the daily language environment. We can compare this information with the estimated language access of a child with normal hearing at the same age level. The device also enables us to look at the child's conversational turns and the adult's conversational turns and to identify times and/or activities during the day that facilitate the best language interactions. In-depth analysis of these interactions is now possible by combining the computer analysis with traditional - but time- and personnel-intensive - language sampling procedures.

With LENA Pro, we now have technology that will help us figure out what is working and what is not. And this level of insight is bound to open new doors for research and clinical practice.

Infoture division LENA LABS announces new LENA Language Assessment
Infoture, Inc., 1/6/2009
A division of Infoture, Inc., LENA LABS has launched a new service, the LENA Language Assessment. Designed with the unique needs of speech language professionals in mind, the new option is an inexpensive entry point to LENA Pro technology, which retails for $6,699.
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Television is harmful to babies, pediatricians say
By Sarah Jane Tribble
Want a simple way to help your baby or grandchild get healthier in the new year? Turn off the television. Sure it's easy to use television or a video to distract the kids while trying to prepare dinner or fold that last bit of laundry. And, yes, videos such as Baby Einstein claim they'll make your little one smarter. But, for children under 2, that screen might be doing just the opposite.
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Obama's $10 Billion Promise Stirs Hope in Early Education
By Sam Dillon
It was the morning after the presidential election, and Matthew Melmed, executive director of Zero to Three, a national organization devoted to early childhood education, could barely contain his exultation.
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Study: Poverty dramatically affects children's brains
By Greg Toppo
A new study finds that certain brain functions of some low-income 9- and 10-year-olds pale in comparison with those of wealthy children and that the difference is almost equivalent to the damage from a stroke.
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